1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to rehabilitation equipments, and more particularly, to a system integrating an existing equipment having rehabilitation functions with a machine vision module without any substantial modification of the equipment so that the equipment can be further connected to an interactive module through the machine vision module for interacting with an interactive software in the interactive module.
2. Description of Related Art
When people get injured from diseases or accidents and have their physical activity detrimentally affected, they may recover the activity of their limbs to an anticipative recovery level efficiently under assistance of rehabilitation equipments in addition to internal/surgical medical treatment. However, traditional rehabilitation treatment may be uncomfortable experience to many people who participate the rehabilitation treatment, such as patients, rehabilitation engineers and companions because they have to face emotionless rehabilitation equipments and focus their attention on repeated, monotonous as well as dull rehabilitation courses to be practiced. Besides, the discouragement coming along with pains or failure in meeting the anticipative recovery level may be magnified due to the patients and other participators' excessive attention. This would be the major reason for the facts that the patients and the participators lose their willing to persevere with and even discontinue their rehabilitation treatment.
Many medical and rehabilitation institutions have noted these problems and endeavor to mitigate the painful feeling rendered by rehabilitation treatment and to enhance the efficiency of rehabilitation treatment. The most direct and essential way therein is to improve the rehabilitation equipments. Thus, some rehabilitation equipments integrated with interactive modules have been developed and adopted. For example, a rehabilitation equipment may be provided with one or more sensing devices for sensing movements of the rehabilitation equipment operated by a user and transforming these movements into expressive digital signals to be transmitted to an interactive module. Then when the digital signals behave in interactive software of the interactive module, the user can operate the rehabilitation equipment in responding to a series of situational scenes produced by the interactive software according to the digital signals. As a result, the operation of the rehabilitation equipment is added with interest so as to stimulate the user's usage intention. The aforementioned sensing devices are typically immovably installed on the rehabilitation equipment and communicated with the interactive module through a specific interface for data transmission. Further, the interactive software provided by the interactive module is exclusively designed for the particular rehabilitation equipment. Such conventional interactive module and sensing devices are integrated on the particular rehabilitation equipment and are not compatible with an originally existing rehabilitation equipment. It means that medical and rehabilitation institutions may have to replace their old rehabilitation equipments with new ones or they may have to structurally modify their old rehabilitation equipments in order to connect the same with the interactive modules. Either of the above manners can consume considerable costs and make the modified rehabilitation equipments unacceptable to medical and rehabilitation institutions in the financial perspective.